20. Various Artists, Supercop soundtrack Yeah, I don’t really get this one. While I’ve acknowledged that well-built compilations hold a special sway over college radio deejays who may be otherwise confronted with the dauntingly unfamiliar across the new music rotation … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1996, 20 and 19
This week at spectrum Culture, I started with an album review. Specifically, this was another of my attempts to write about an artist who I like a great deal, but whose work is a little outside of my proverbial writing wheelhouse. I’m somewhat satisfied with the resulting review of the new record from M.I.A., but I do feel like it could have used more precise and detailed descriptions of the music itself. I was somewhat at a loss to describe the melange of sounds she creates. M.I.A. makes fantastic songs, but I don’t thing she’s yet pulled off a album … Continue reading Spectrum Check
Now that it is completely, definitively, decisively established that the surest route to mainstream chart success these days is repetitive, dance-tinged songs about feeling empowered while dancing all night long in the club, I can’t help but wonder if there are any tracks on those slicked-up albums that take a look at the melancholy downside. It’s not that I think there’s some responsibility of pop culture to provide that balance. Instead, I’m just struck by the way that the college radio playlists of my younger days often seemed to have songs that portrayed drinking cultures in all their permutations, from … Continue reading One for Friday: Mark Eitzel, “Some Bartenders Have the Gift of a Pardon”
It’s been quite the season for movie stars portraying endurance in the face of overwhelming odds while operating in isolation. While premieres and the resulting opening chatter took place earlier, across successive weekends Sandra Bullock tumbled through space and Tom … Continue reading Odds and ends, odds and ends, lost time is not found again
When I was a kid, I had a strong affection for Chicago, despite the small detail that I’d never actually been there. My fondness for the City of Big Shoulders probably had its origins in my devoted viewing of channel … Continue reading My Writers: Mike Royko
#7 — 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) Stanley Kubrick, master director and cinematic innovator with a heavy influence on countless cinematic greats who followed, won exactly one Academy Award. One. Of course, that’s more of a damnation of … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 60s — Number Seven
As has been widely reported, 12 Years a Slave is difficult to watch. That’s by design, of course, but it’s not simply a dutiful willingness to meet the scourge of American slavery at the only place any creator of conscience … Continue reading I wish you could know what it means to be me, then you’d see and agree that every man should be free
22. Soundgarden, Down on the Upside By 1996, it was already a decisive time for the various acts that surged to popularity on the grunge wave started by Nirvana and swelled to terrifying size by Pearl Jam. The commercial alternative … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1996, 22 and 21
I had a nicely balanced week at Spectrum Culture: one film review, one album review. First I reviewed the new album from Minor Alps, a duo comprised of Juliana Hatfield and Matthew Caws, the latter best known as the leader of Nada Surf. His involvement piqued my interest, though, because of his preceding tenure with the Cost of Living. And thus my quest to cite obscure bands from my college radio days in Spectrum reviews marks another tally. On the film side, I wrote about a new documentary tracing the genesis, production and influence of George A. Romero’s The Night … Continue reading Spectrum Check
The announcement this week that the few remaining Blockbuster video stores would be closing inspired a lot of surprisingly wistful reminiscences for the chain with the garish blue and yellow color scheme that was once best known (and reviled in all the right corners) for a selective prudishness that deemed Henry & June unacceptable but Playboy exercise videos a-okay. (To be fair, I’m in absolutely no hurry to sit through the former again, so they may have had a point purely on aesthetic merits in my example.) Of course, this didn’t truly reflect a swelling of nostalgia for one particular … Continue reading One for Friday: Darren Hanlon, “Video Store”
Coffee for Two 